Fresh from the Labs

First up this month is a weight manager, Pondus. According to its
Web site: “Pondus is a personal weight management program written in
Python and Gtk+2 released under the GPL. It aims to be simple to use,
lightweight and fast. The data can be plotted to get a quick overview of
the history of your weight and is stored in XML files for easy access
and modification with other programs.” Simple it is, indeed, and the
installation isn't too shabby either. Pondus lets you track your
weight over a period of time and displays your progress with
a graph. It also switches between metric and imperial measurements.

Figure 1. The Lovely Minimalism of Pondus and My Weight Chart

Installation

In terms of dependencies, you need a few Python-related libraries
installed before you can start. Whenever you compile something, the
installer invariably asks for the development files, so make sure
you install the python-dev files first. If you still run into
problems, some Googling turned up a posting in a forum about some
of the packages on which Pondus depends:

python 2.4.4-6

python-gobject 2.14.1-1

python-gtk2 2.12.1-1

python-matplotlib 0.90.1-2

python-support 0.7.6

Once the dependencies are out of the way, download the source package
from the project's Web site, extract the contents and open a terminal
in the new folder.

As root, enter the command:

# python setup.py install

If all goes well, Pondus should compile and even install itself in your
Applications menu. On my system, I found a new menu entry under
Utilities→Pondus. If you can't find Pondus on your menu, you can start it by
entering the command pondus.

Usage

Pondus is very minimalist,
but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Upon entering Pondus, you'll
see a small window with five buttons. The first
adds a line of data—that being your weight and the date for entry.
The second removes a line, and the third edits a line of data.
Once you have entered some weights and times, you then can display
it as a graph by clicking the fourth button. If you want to switch
between pounds and kilograms, the fifth button opens the settings
window and lets you change that (this is one of only two options,
the other is to remember the window size).

Tracking your progress is really what Pondus is about though, so you
will want to jump over to the graph section—the fourth button, or
Plot data. Click the button, and a window titled Plot Weight
appears with a neat line graph representing your weight over a period of
time. If you look at the bottom right, there's a drop-down box with All
Time written in it. This allows you to filter out the rest of the
information to what you've had over the past year, or just the past month. If
you want to filter your time to something more specific, on the bottom
left are two fields called Select Date Range. Enter the start date
you want to see in the first field and the end date in the second field, click
Update on the far right, and the graph will update with the selected
information. For those of you who want to save a copy of what
your progress has been, clicking the Save Plot button at the bottom
lets you save your graph as a .png file. I'm a weedy little
runt myself, so I'm not trying to lose weight, but rather gain
it, so check my screenshot for an example (which is in kilograms by the way,
I don't way 72 pounds).

Overall, Pondus is a very simple and clean application that will appeal
to many new PC users, as it sits in a nice and small window and doesn't
baffle you with a zillion options. I'm guessing that Pondus probably
will add more features over time, but hopefully not too many, as doing so
might alienate its target audience. It's a lovely, neat little program.

BeeDiff (beediff) is a GUI program for comparing text differences between
two files, and any differences will be highlighted in different colors
depending on the type of difference. Any differences found then can
be deleted or copied between files. BeeDiff is developed with new Qt4
libraries, and as such, it's very quick and lightweight. It also happens
to be quite easy to install, which is another bonus.

Installation

For installation purposes, you have two choices: an i586 binary or a
source tarball.

If you choose the binary, first download the provided tarball and extract
the contents to a folder of your choice.

Then, as root or using sudo, copy the binary to /usr/bin or your preferred
binary directory to run BeeDiff system-wide.

Next, copy the included icon, beediff.png, to /usr/share/icons or whichever icon directory you prefer.